Posted on 08/23/2009 11:49:00 AM PDT by neverdem
THE war between science and religion is notable for the amount of civil disobedience on both sides. Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight. Whether out of a live-and-let-live philosophy, or a belief that religion and science are actually compatible, or a heartfelt indifference to the question, theyre choosing to sit this one out.
Still, the war continues, and its not just a sideshow. There are intensely motivated and vocal people on both sides making serious and conflicting claims.
There are atheists who go beyond declaring personal disbelief in God and insist that any form of god-talk, any notion of higher purpose, is incompatible with a scientific worldview. And there are religious believers who insist that evolution cant fully account for the creation of human beings.
I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isnt just that theyre both wrong. Its that theyre wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selections creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.
If both groups were to truly accept that power, the landscape might look different. Believers could scale back their conception of Gods role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of higher purpose are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
The believers who need to hear this sermon arent just adherents of intelligent design, who deny that natural selection can explain biological complexity in general. There are also believers with smaller reservations about the Darwinian story. They accept that God used evolution to do his creative work (theistic evolution), but think that, even so, he had to step in and provide special ingredients at some...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Wikipedia.com
Interesting. You are now relegating creationism as a science while proclaiming that evolution is a religion! Are you trying to lay the ground work for a new religion?
“One significant difference is that the words God, creationism, and Genesis have been systematically purged from ID explanations”
Interesting how you are moving over to the ID side and purging God from your discussions. Perhap you should re-incarnate as IDGunsGuts.
FROM THE ARTICLE:"Oddly, an underestimation of natural selections creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic."
From Genesis: Evolution can only occur with HETEROSEXUAL relationships.
Most secularists don't have a clue...
Religious faggots seek ceremonious sanctification and esoteric absolution in some type of marriage rite for their guilt-ridden, impoverished egos, but that still fails to give them a connection to the eternal in both a religious and temporal, procreant sense - - the union does not produce offspring.
FROM Genesis: Evolution can only occur with HETEROSEXUAL relationships.
“Interesting how you are moving over to the ID side and purging God from your discussions. Perhap you should re-incarnate as IDGunsGuts”
Why not use the old saw about wife beating? At least you could attempt to be less obvious in the “best defense is an offense” effort. Nonetheless, what a silly statement.
You seem to be fond of this expression, having posted it in succession to two different people.
Well, I hate to throw cold water on your enthusiasm, but this is not entirely accurate. Asexual reproduction occurs in primitive but abundant life forms including bacteria and viruses.
And this reproduction includes the risks and rewards of mutation as well as inaccurate reproduction. While sexual reproduction opens the possibilities of rapid evolution which can at times seem targeted toward a particular result, these creatures make do with an extremely rapid life process and amazing fecundity.
They do indeed evolve.
I guess you don't see the growning momentum that the ID'ers are working on in removing God from our language.
I would say the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture is firmly in the I.D. camp and yet since the beginning of the year they have published over a dozen articles discussing various ideas and how they relate to God.
If they're trying to remove God from the language, it doesn't seem like there's much momentum there. But maybe you have some other I.D. folk in mind? And some examples? (grown)
I have been told numerous times here that discovery.org does not represent mainstream ID.
Well, I did ask who you had in mind and for some examples so whether you’ve heard what about who doesn’t really matter....You say someone is trying to remove God from the language, well, here is your chance to say where this supposed “momentum is coming from.
(I promise to only tell my ten or so best friends.)
It is so obvious. This ID movement to replace God with the Intelligent Designer. There are posts and posts and posts to show how it was the ID and not God.
Here is a post by IDGunsGuts showing how atheists are embracing ID as ID removes God from the equation.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2318712/posts
Posts and posts and posts and yet you cannot show even one?
Not one post where some I.D.er is replacing God with “The Intelligent Designer” or I.D.? Not a name either? No one?
Correct. There are two.
Well, are you going to share with us this two post “momentum”? Or just keep saying “obvious”?
Behe: This while I argue for design, the question of the identity of the designer is left open.
Demski: The most obvious difference is that scientific creationism has prior religious commitments whereas intelligent design does not. ... Intelligent design ... has no prior religious commitments and interprets the data of science on generally accepted scientific principles. In particular, intelligent design does not depend on the biblical account of creation.”
Demski: ID is not an interventionist theory. Its only commitment is that the design in the world be empirically detectable. All the design could therefore have emerged through a cosmic evolutionary process that started with the Big Bang. What’s more, the designer need not be a deity. It could be an extraterrestrial or a telic process inherent in the universe. ID has no doctrine of creation.
Perhaps you will understand when you read what they have on their website.
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Scholars and science writers who are willing to explore the evidence for themselves are coming to the conclusion that intelligent design is different from creationism. As mentioned earlier, historian of science Ronald Numbers has acknowledged the distinction between ID and creationism. So has science writer Robert Wright, writing in Time magazine: "Critics of ID, which has been billed in the press as new and sophisticated, say it's just creationism in disguise. If so it's a good disguise. Creationists believe that God made current life-forms from scratch. The ID movement takes no position on how life got here, and many adherents believe in evolution. Some even grant a role to the evolutionary engine posited by Darwin: natural selection. They just deny that natural selection alone could have driven life all the way from pond scum to us." (10)
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